Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

14.
BREAKING THE MOLD
T
HREE
 A
FRICAN
 C
HIEFS
O
N
S
EPTEMBER
6, 1895, the ocean liner Tantallon Castle docked at
Plymouth on the southern coast of England. Three African chiefs,
Khama of the Ngwato, Bathoen of the Ngwaketse, and Sebele of the
Kwena, disembarked and took the 8:10 express train to Paddington
Station, London. The three chiefs had come to Britain on a mission: to
save their and five other Tswana states from Cecil Rhodes. The
Ngwato, Ngwaketse, and Kwena were three of the eight Tswana states
comprising what was then known as Bechuanaland, which would
become Botswana after independence in 1966.
The tribes had been trading with Europeans for most of the
nineteenth century. In the 1840s, the famous Scottish missionary
David Livingstone had traveled extensively in Bechuanaland and
converted King Sechele of the Kwena to Christianity. The first
translation of the Bible into an African language was in Setswana, the
language of the Tswana. In 1885 Britain had declared Bechuanaland a
protectorate. The Tswana were content with the arrangement, as they
thought this would bring them protection from further European
invasions, particularly from the Boers, with whom they had been
clashing since the Great Trek in 1835, a migration of thousands of
Boers into the interior to escape from British colonialism. The British,
on the other hand, wanted control of the area to block both further
expansions by the Boers (
this page
–
this page
) and possible expansions
by Germans, who had annexed the area of southwest Africa
corresponding to today’s Namibia. The British did not think that a
full-scale colonization was worthwhile. The high commissioner Rey

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summarized the attitudes of the British government in 1885 clearly:
“We have no interest in the country to the north of the Molope [the
Bechuanaland protectorate], except as a road to the interior; we
might therefore confine ourselves for the present to preventing that